50 min at 147° followed by 1 hr 50 min at 153°. My 147° was a little closer to 149°. 153° was right on. I got this schedule from the book The Brewer’s Companion by Randy Mosher. This book is a must have when you get to all-grain!

Sparge

5 gallons of sparge water at 180° for a total of 45 min of time. It actually was only about 25 minutes…I’ll have to work on that and see how big a deal timing is on that. The sparge arm worked like a champ though! I may have drilled too many/ too big holes.

Boil

90 min boil with the following additions:
2 oz hallertauer at 90 min
1/2 tsp irish moss at 15 minutes
0.5 oz cascade at 10 min
The new burner seems to work alright and it looks like it is boiling away happily although I cannot see the liquid because of all the steam because it is only 30° outside…

Whoops! I only ended up with 3.5 gallons of wort after the boil. I’ll have to devise a better way of working that out…I added tap water to bring it up to 5.5 gallons.

Icooled with the wort chiller to 75° in 17 minutes. I pitched the yeast and then cleaned up.

Well, that was quite the experience. It gives me a new appreciation for extract brewing – it’s much quicker, that’s for sure. But it was a good experience and the beer will be wonderful. It’s a good feeling to know I took grains and made beer all by myself.

03/16/08

Today I racked Clementine’s Porter. I sneaked a taste and was very pleased. It is very chocolatey with just a hint of molasses. Very good indeed. The SG was 1.011. I will bottle next weekend.

03/23/08

I’m bottling Clementine’s Porter today. I’ve decided to do 3 gallons with the normal proportion of dextrose sugar, but for the other 2 gallons I am priming with molasses (at the rate of 1 cup per 5 gallons). I’m only doing two gallons of the molasses-primed stuff because I think it may overpower the beer. But it may be perfect – who knows…

The biggest question is how I will replace the amber extract. I think I want a little more of a chocolatey note in the beer, so I’ll make up lost color with more chocolate malt (1 lb).

So on to creating my recipe:
I want to match the OG of the original, 1060. To do this, I’ll find the number of total gravity units I need to create the desired OG. First, I need to convert the extract potential of my fermentables into Gravity Units (GU’s). All a GU is is subtracting 1 from the number and then multiplying by 1000. Thus, 1.030 becomes 30 GU’s.

next I multiply by gallons of the wort of the final batch:
5.5 gal of final volume after boil * 60 GU desired OG = 330 TGU (total gravity units)
What this means is that I need to get 330 TGU’s from all of the combined fermentable ingredients.

Now that I know how many TGU’s I need, I’ll work backwards a bit to find how many GU’s the specialty grains will cover:
[eq: lbs of malt = GU’s contributed by this malt / (extract potential of malt GU’s * mash efficiency %)]

1 lb crystal: 1 = x / (34 * 0.68) = 23.1

1 lb chocolate: 1 = x / (30 * 0.68) = 20.4

.25 lb black: 0.25 = x / (27 * 0.68) = 4.6

These add up to a total of 48 GU’s of the total 330. That means I want to add 282 more GU’s worth of base malt.

You may have noticed I got rid of the brown sugar. This is because sucrose (table sugar) does not add any desirable qualities to a beer, and the flavor that I want from brown sugar is actually just the molasses. I could boil the brown sugar and add it for some caramel/molasses flavoring, but I’ll just take it out and add more molasses. I am also going to try using molasses as priming sugar for half the batch (assuming preliminary tastings go well), just to see how that turns out. I want this to be MOLASSES porter. but not overly so.

The BU’s of the last batch were around 20, and I liked where it was or perhaps a little higher (~25 IBU). I am going to switch the bittering hops to an English variety however. I’ll go with golding, challenger, fuggle, or maybe go with northern brewer. We’ll see what I can find down at Hops and Berries.

I’ll boil for 90 minutes, to get some more caramelization going.

I’m not going to brew this for a week or two. I’ll try to have some camera action so I can well document my first all-grain attempt though.